How they keep on smiling at Disney

I recently came across a piece on the 'happiest place on earth', Florida's Walt Disney World. Several nuggets were noteworthy: Disney World and its related local industries make Disney the largest single-site employer in the US. The site is substantial enough to warrant its own Disney police force. And the operation practices what they call the 'science' of guestology (google it). Of most interest is how Disney trains its employees to deliver that happy feeling to its paying customers.

Anne Reyers' and Jonathan Matusitz's paper focuses on emotional labour: the effort we put in to regulate our emotions to deliver the outcomes the organisation expects. In Disney's case, this is happiness and delight for every guest, all the time, enshrining the notion that even a single unsatisfied guest cancels out 70 happy ones. Walt himself, having observed frowns and negativity on tours of the grounds, insisted on Disney University, a mandatory training process for every employee, that more than anything else is an extended emotion regulation regime. From the off, the training frames the job in terms of play rather than work, and trainees are taken through methods of managing facial and voice cues to maintain a happy, relaxed, and accessible approach. This is effectively a masterclass in surface acting.

However, research suggests that Disney employees actively involved in surface acting are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion. This accords with broader evidence that surface acting is hard work. Genuinely feeling the emotions you wish to exhibit - deep acting - is aspired for at the Disney University but there are no guarantees when a pushy brat keeps calling you names. Indeed, other research indicates that buttoning back anger is the hardest thing to do for Disney employees, and having to keep doing so is a major driver of emotional exhaustion.  Studies on Disney employees suggests two ways to stave this off are by understanding the importance of  emotional regulation and a fit to role requirements, and by believing that their manager values their emotional contributions, perhaps by offering rewards (in keeping with the ERI stress model mentioned recently). Reyers and Matusitz believe that the training at Disney does in fact attend to these two coping mechanisms, which may partly explain the low attrition rate of 12-15%, compared to the 60% standard in hospitality roles. It's also worth noting recent research that if the positive emotion is reciprocated, staff may end up feeling genuinely happier too.

These things are far from Disney-specific. These principles 'have come to govern the rest of the customer service world' to push 'the frontier of Disney-like happiness across the world'...which may delight or horrify you.

Anne Reyers, & Jonathan Matusitz (2012). Emotional Regulation at Walt Disney World: An Impression Management View Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 27 (3), 139-159 DOI: 10.1080/15555240.2012.701167

Monitoring 'self-managing' employees may provoke negative work behaviours

Good things can come when members of an organisation are allowed to manage their own work, such as greater job satisfaction and better adherence with organisational policy. But this involves management doing an uncomfortable thing: surrendering control. Often, organisations compensate by coupling self-management with surveillance techniques of the  close-up or electronic variety. New research suggests that self-management has even more benefits, but that mashing it with surveillance can end up bringing out the worst in people.

Authors Jaclyn Jenson and Jana Raver conducted two studies, the first looking to establish whether people given freedom would use it to perform more positive, discretionary acts, so-called organisational citizenship behaviours or OCBs. By mocking up a fictional consultancy, the researchers could recruit 211 participants (in their own minds, employees on a one-off, very short-term contract) to show up, review investment advice, and write it up in the form of a report. Before starting their short-term shift, they were given Terms of Service both printed and read aloud; these either emphasised self-management or other-management, a promise cashed out by the shift supervisor sitting passively or actively pacing the room. The work involved discretionary elements, such as how long the report and whether to complete or skip some optional questionnaires. The amount of discretional effort  was turned into a OCB score: individuals in the self-management condition scored higher, making efforts over and above what was demanded.

Study two surveyed individuals across a range of organisations, to offer a field replication and extend the investigation to understand how surveillance interacts with self-management. The survey introduced a further outcome measure, counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs), choosing to undermine the organisation in some way, such as deliberately dragging your heels on a task. The data from the 423 respondents suggested that surveillance in itself encouraged CWBs, but this was driven by its interaction with self-management. When individuals believed they were supposed to be self managing - 'It is my responsibility, and not my organization’s, to monitor my own workplace behavior and job performance' - but the reality was that they were being monitored,  their CWBs were markedly higher. Jensen and Raver predicted this finding, seeing it as an example of psychological reactance: when freedom you believe you deserve is seemingly taken away, you will try to recover autonomy through other means, even at the expense of the organisation. Analysing trust in the organisation, also surveyed, revealed that the normally observed relationship between self management and higher trust was severed once surveillance entered the mix.

This research suggests that if you don't want to evoke petty revenges from employees, it's vital that cultures of self-management aren't tempered by close surveillance. By resisting that temptation, you're likely to yield benefits, your people more willing to perform beyond what is expected.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, & Jana L. Raver (2012). When Self-Management and Surveillance Collide: Consequences for Employees’ Organizational Citizenship and Counterproductive Work Behaviors Group Organization Management, 37 (3), 308-346 DOI: 10.1177/1059601112445804

Laugh and the workplace laughs with you

How far can a laugh carry? According to Christopher Robert and James Wilbanks, it can reverberate through time, with far-reaching consequences. Their theoretical paper, synthesising research from neuroscience, behavioural psychology and the workplace, suggests that funny incidents can have a cumulative positive effect through a 'Humour Wheel'.

Humour can be understood as a positive emotional state arising from incongruity: a joke puts two elements together in an unexpected way, and sarcasm belies what is said with what is intended  (and appears to facilitate creativity for this reason). It's one of the most intense positive emotions, putting aside triumph, which tends to accompany rare events, and sensual pleasure, typically inappropriate for a workplace. Humour is instead quintessentially social, and can occur frequently; for Robert and Wilbanks this is crucial, as established theories of workplace affective events (situations that change our mood or emotions) suggest that quantity matters more than significance of such events for shaping workplace outcomes.

Moreover, the contagious nature of laughter - we laugh at a laugh even shorn of context, and our brains respond to laughter sounds in a similar way as they do to something funny - means that a single moment of humour can evoke and encourage others - both directly through emotional contagion and also by acting as a trigger to permit employees to breach straight-faced operations with crinkled smiles. As a consequence, an instance of humour can lead to a longer-standing 'humour episode', and it is these that lift mood and have an effect on interpersonal contact, deepening affection and also helping to shape group norms of what behaviour is desirable - including 'humour is ok'. Hence, a positive feedback loop or wheel. Not every humour instance need be joy inducing; a wry comment can be sufficient to seed the ground and make it possible for other moments to follow.

What could be the consequences of the positive affect that humour elicits?  Frederickson's broaden-and-build theory suggests it encourages us to approach opportunities rather than retreat: exploration and playness ensue, allowing us to build positive resources for the future. This is a good way to make sense of the manifold effects of positive affect - on health, cooperation, organisational citizenship, job satisfaction, flow and more. And as negative states can form their own feedback loops, humour can be valuable as a derailer - its disruptive, intrusive quality ringing out over frustration or fear. Getting a 'humour wheel' going in regular work teams is clearly useful, and other contexts suggested by the authors include mentoring, where the importance of satisfying and informal relationships would naturally fit with humorous episodes, and also leadership, where leader affect is known to be contagious to employees, and the oft-desired transformational style is linked to humour usage. They call for deeper research into these areas, as well as how humour may work against tendencies to absenteesim and attrition, and suggest that 'humor might be an unsung hero in peoples’ day-to-day affective lives.'

Christopher Robert, & James E Wilbanks (2012). The Wheel Model of humor: Humor events and affect in organizations Human Relations, 65 (9), 1071-1099 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711433133

Are leaders judged more harshly for mistakes that break with gender stereotypes?

We all make mistakes. A recent piece of research investigates how our feelings about leaders are affected when they slip up, and asks whether we are more forgiving when the error is 'to be expected' because of gender stereotypes.

Researchers Christian Thoroughgood, Katina Sawyer and Samuel Hunter produced a series of sets of emails describing how fictional employees perceived their leader. The leader - male or female, in either a masculine (construction) or feminine (nursing) industry - was presented in one of three error conditions. In the first they were revealed to have made three task errors such as badly managing resources. The second involved three relationship errors such as losing their temper, and the final was a 'no error' condition. The 301 student participants, primarily female, rated how competent the leader was at tasks and relationship, and how much they would want to work for them. Thoroughgood's team predicted that women leaders would be judged more harshly when they make a relationship error, and men for task errors, as these violate expectations of where each gender should be competent. In addition, they predicted this would be compounded when working in a same-gendered industry: a female nursing head has no business being bad with people...or so the story goes.

In fact, the results were a little different. Making errors certainly led to lower ratings, with task competence being hit harder by task errors, and vice versa. But the kind of errors that men and women made didn't seem to matter, neither overall nor when effects in the specific industries were examined. They key gender difference that was established was that for both kinds of errors, men received more severe judgements than women, but only in the construction industry conditions. It appears participants have unequal expectations for men and women's competence, holding the highest bar for men operating in a comfort zone environment. It's worth noting that the gender of participants was evaluated as a co-variate in the analysis, ensuring that the preponderance of women didn't lead to systematic bias.

The authors reflect that the relationship/task errors could have been more sharply gendered; for instance, accurate email planning (a task error) may be seen equally as a female managerial trait as well as a male one. But on the face of this evidence, people expect men and women to be competent across domains if they want to be seen as a competent, desirable leader.

Christian N. Thoroughgood, Katina B. Sawyer, & Samuel T. Hunter (2012). Real Men Don’t Make Mistakes: Investigating the Effects of Leader Gender, Error Type, and the Occupational Context on Leader Error Perceptions Journal of Business and Psychology DOI: 10.1007/s10869-012-9263-8

How Type As cope with stress – for better and worse

You might be familiar with the term 'Type A personality': someone highly strung, organised, proactive, and tackling all - sometimes more - than they can handle. There has been much attention on its long-term effects on health, notably heart disease (it turns out to have a low prognostic power), but we have a less complete picture of how it influences how we feel in specific stressful work environments. A study by Amanda Allisey, John Rodwell and Andrew Noblet reveals more, including some surprising effects.

Allisey's team surveyed 897 operational police officers, mostly male, based in Australia. They wanted to investigate a specific account - Siegrist's Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) model - which states that stress occurs when we put in effort and receive little reward, particularly when we are personally overcommitted to the work. Taking it beyond its medical roots, the researchers were interested in work outcomes, specifically affective commitment and psychological distress, and in the effect of Type A personality. They surveyed these features, along with measures of effort and various type of occupational reward, and used regression to see what factors were driving the work outcomes. A separate measure of overcommitment was taken and entered early into the regression to ensure that any effects of Type A were over and above the individual difference already known to influence the ERI.

They found that multiple components of Type A influenced the workplace outcomes, but for both good and ill. As predicted, under conditions of high levels of effort, the presence of impatience-irritability lead to greater psychological distress, and further exacerbated things when the job rewards of security and mobility were absent. Conversely, the presence of the achievement striving component seemed to act as a buffer when the individual received little in the way of status, protecting them from psychological distress. Possibly for such individuals, the intrinsic meaning of getting the work done means that organisational awards matter less.

Finally, the component of hostility was overall linked to increased strain. But there was a twist: under conditions of low security and esteem rewards, which would ordinarily lead to lower affective commitment, individuals expressing high hostility were shielded. The researchers conjecture, along the lines of recent research on negative work behaviour, that 'acting-out', for instance by sounding-off vocally, can provide employees with emotional coping benefits. This seems plausible given that both security and esteem showed the strongest overall relationships with psychological distress and affective commitment: these are the things whose absence appears to truly pile on the pressure, calling for some kind of escape valve.

This research suggests that the association of Type A personality with stress susceptibility is oversimplistic. The cluster of traits that sit within the type can help or hinder stress levels, depending on the nature of the stress environment. The study also calls attention to the fact that different rewards may matter much more when it comes to balancing efforts. In particular, the importance of self esteem suggests that maintaining a 'culture of respect' within organisations may be critical not just for employee relations but by protecting them from stress.

Amanda Allisey, John Rodwell, & Andrew Noblet (2012). Personality and the effort-reward imbalance model of stress: Individual differences in reward sensitivity Work & Stress: An International Journal of Work, Health & Organisations , 26 (3), 230-251 DOI: 10.1080/02678373.2012.714535

How to leverage the diversity of teams for creative outcomes

Received wisdom suggests more diverse teams reach more creative outcomes. Yet research is equivocal, suggesting there may be specific conditions that allow diversity to pay off. Research from Erasmus University in Rotterdam suggests that one such condition is how prepared members are to take each others' perspectives.

The potential benefits of diversity were well-expressed by van Knippenberg and colleagues some years back, in their categorisation-elaboration model. This suggests that diversity is most useful as it offers deeper elaboration: expanding on, exploring and contesting the views of other members to reach richer, more tested positions, providing the opposite of group-think. Elaboration has been shown to depend on the nature of the task and on the members having the necessary ability and motivations. In their recent article, Inga Hoever and her team examined whether the approach taken by the team could be another factor.

The study asked three-person teams to attempt a task to improve a fictional theatre's position by coming up with a creative action plan. Diversity was manipulated by giving some teams assigned roles - an Artistic, Event, and Finance Manager - whereas members of other teams held unnamed, generic positions. All teams received guidance on the key artistic, events and finance goals for the theatre: one concise package for generic members or split out, fleshed out, and handed out to the corresponding specialist manager.

In addition, some teams (both multi-role and generic) fell into a perspective-taking condition, where they were encouraged - both verbally and through an example-filled instructions page - to take each other's perspectives as much as possible during the activity. After an individual preparation period, teams spent twenty minutes together preparing an action plan, which was subsequently coded for novelty and value of ideas; both were necessary to deem a plan creative.

Manipulation checks confirmed that the multi-role teams began with more varied viewpoints (based on what members judged as the biggest priorities, recorded after reading their briefs but just before the discussion began), and teams asked to take perspectives had actually done so (based on ratings at the study close). Alone, neither factor had a significant influence on the creativity of the action plans created. But when teams both were multi-role and engaged actively in perspective taking, they performed better than the rest.

What's more, when the research team used video footage to rate teams on how much they engaged in elaboration - acknowledging and building on suggestions, synthesising ideas - they obtained scores that were also higher for diverse teams that explicitly took perspectives. Moreover, analysis confirmed elaboration scores were a mediator for how diversity influenced creativity for perspective-taking teams. When diverse teams make effort to engage in perspective, this facilitates elaboration during the task, leading to more novel, valuable outcomes.

The useful thing about this study is that having more individual ability to elaborate, or the ideal task, isn't always an option. Here we see evidence that altering the process of a creative task can play a part in unlocking the best that diverse perspectives have to offer.

Hoever, I. J., van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W. P., & Barkema, H. G. (2012). Fostering Team Creativity: Perspective Taking as Key to Unlocking Diversity's Potential Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0029159

Having more - even more to lose - makes you happier to commit to organisational change

Imagine Simone and Bridget are two professionals working in the same organisation. Bridget's role is prominent,  provides her with regular development and has an excellent bonus scheme. Her boss is encouraging and supportive. Simone is on similar pay but is based in a department that doesn't do bonuses, is underappreciated by the rest of the organisation and neglects staff development. Her boss is aloof and absent.

Along comes a sweeping organisational change program - new departments, different reporting lines, role reviews, the works. Who should be most resistant? My money would have been on Bridget: the one with most to lose. But research from Jiseon Shin and colleagues at the University of Maryland suggests the opposite: that being in receipt of 'organisational inducements' prior to a change program makes you more likely to support it.

Shin's team conducted surveys with employees from a South Korean company who were going through changes of the sort described above. For the first survey, three weeks before the changes began, participants rated organisational inducements, which involves both material benefits like health care or pay, as well as less tangible factors like development support. At time two, five months into the change program, participants expressed their commitment to change, both in terms of their cool, rational take on it - normative commitment - and their 'affective commitment' - the emotional connection now recognised as a key component of buy-in. In addition, their managers  rated whether they put this into practice, by vocally supporting the change in the presence of others or coming up with new ideas that fit with the change.

The analysis revealed that higher organisational inducements were associated with more commitment to change, both affective and normative. Why would this be? It turns out that inducements heighten both state positive affect and sense of social exchange, both measured in employees at time two. The former involves feelings of excitement and enthusiasm, and the latter is the belief that the organisation engages in reciprocity, paying back what is put into it. The better employees felt treated, the better they felt – positive affect in itself buffering anxieties – and the more they trusted they would be treated well later on. These two factors were shown to be the mechanism that caused higher commitment. What this commitment led to was slightly more complicated, but the upshot was that normative commitment had more dependable consequences, leading to both more frequent change behaviours and lower turnover, measured twenty-two months later.

A key take-away from this study for organisations is that to better manage change initiatives, they need to pay careful attention to the conditions that precede the change. If employees feel they have had been treated right to date, they are more willing and more able to surf the ambiguities of newly introduced change. If they feel otherwise, they're likely to face the future at a low ebb, thin on hope.

Jiseon Chin, M Susan Taylor, & Myeong-Gu Seo (2012). Resources for Change: The Relationships of Organizational Inducements and Psychological Resilience to Employees' Attitudes and Behaviors Toward Organizational Change Academy of Management Journal, 55 (3), 727-748 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0325